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Saturday Night Live is the nation's longest running sketch comedy show. Throughout its three decade long run, SNL has featured nearly every major celebrity and band, with such comedy greats as Dan Akroyd and Eddie Murphy. Saturday Night Live has maintained the same format throughout its run, beginning with a sketch and interspersing its brief comedy elements with comments from the host and an occasional song from the featured band. Saturday Night LIve is currently directed by the actor-comedian Lorne Michaels, a popular Canadian director who is known for his sarcastic humor and political satire.

Not only has Saturday Night Live come to define the sketch comedy format, it has also had an immeasurable impact on television in general. SNL has won more than 20 Emmy awards for excellence in comedy, and it has been ranked as one of the top ten television shows of all time by TV Guide. Many of the comedians who got their start on Saturday Night Live went on to long and glorious comedy careers, with many of the comedians such as Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler parlaying their SNL success into feature films and television shows.

For a show that has been airing for more than 3 decades, Saturday Night Live has maintained surprisingly constant ratings. Aside from a brief period in the 1980s, SNL has retained a top 20 spot in the ratings during its time slot. Saturday Night Live has also produced a number of spin-offs, including books and movies. Many Saturday Night Live characters have been made into feature films, including the Blues Brothers and Pat the Androgynous Person.

Saturday Night Live has been taped at Studio 8H in the GE Building ever since its inception. The studio was specifically designed for SNL, featuring multiple staging areas, a live audience, and the ability to have live performances from bands and DJs. Each episode of Saturday Night Live takes five days to produce, with the writers and creative staff going through several dozen concepts for every sketch that makes it on the show. Saturday Night Live currently airs at 11:30 PM Eastern Time on NBC, although reruns are aired on both Comedy Central and E! Entertainment Television.

Saturday Night Live News

Last night, legends of the comedy scene took to the "Saturday Night Live" stage to celebrate 40 years of the sketch show's history. Chances are if you were on Twitter at all, you heard about it.
Any look out at the crowd watching the show was surreal: it seemed as though everyone famous was there, from "SNL" alumni like Adam Sandler and David Spade to comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Louis C.K. to musicians like Kanye West and Miley Cyrus. Heck, even Sarah Palin was there.

We've already talked about Chris Rock's controversial "Saturday Night Live" monologue, but he did something much, much worse on that very same episode.
Those who saw the sketch "The Couple" live almost immediately started branding it as the worst sketch "SNL" has ever done.
The sketch featured Rock and new cast member Leslie Jones as an older couple getting ready for a date who bicker constantly. The jokes are almost nonexistent, and when they do pop up, they're pretty far off the mark (a Left-Eye joke? It's not 1996 anymore).

Chris Rock was on "Saturday Night Live" this weekend, and he took every opportunity to make headlines.
Much like with fellow comedian Louis C.K.'s appearance on "SNL" earlier this year, Rock took his monologue segment and basically performed a short stand-up comedy set, playing to his strengths.
However, Rock's choice of material turned out to be controversial for the show, as the comedian told jokes on topics like terrorism, 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing.

And you thought that Matthew McConaughey couldn't make any less sense.
On this weekend's episode of "Saturday Night Live," Jim Carrey took the stage as guest host. There were a few memorable sketches, including a Sia "Chandelier" music video that has been making the rounds, but perhaps none were as funny as the Lincoln commercial spoofs.
In the parody commercials, Carrey sits in as McConaughey, driving his Lincoln SUV through a city at night. Visually, everything looks almost identical to the original, but the lines Carrey speaks are another story.

Is "Saturday Night Live" a sketch stealer?
The long-running NBC sketch show is under scrutiny after a duo of improvisers and sketch writers with the Groundlings (an improv comedy theater and school in Los Angeles) gently accused "SNL" of stealing their sketch.
The most recent episode featured a sketch in which castmembers Cecily Strong and Sasheer Zamata, along with guest host Sarah Silverman, played Tina Turner impersonators who interjected cracks about their ailing careers while performing "Rollin'.

Here's a pro tip: If you're going to interview the stars of a new movie, go see the movie first.
Chris Parente for Channel 2 in Denver learned that lesson the hard way. Parente was set to interview former "Saturday Night Live" stars Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader about their new indie drama "The Skeleton Twins," but he quickly ran into trouble when it became clear that he hadn't seen the movie.
Parente started off well enough, telling the duo that the movie was "great" and asking them about the mix of drama and comedy in it.

Rob Schneider has officially been dropped as a spokesperson of insurance company State Farm, after backlash pressured for his removal.
Schneider, who reprised a role from his "Saturday Night Live" days to appear in the commercial for Discount Double Check, raised controversy from consumers due to his openly anti-vaccination stance.
Phil Supple, State Farm's director of public affairs, said that the ad "has unintentionally been used as a platform for dicussion unrelated to the products and services we provide.

Just in case you didn't already love Chris Pratt...
The "Guardians of the Galaxy" star's promos for his "Saturday Night Live" appearance are out, and they're amazing.
In the clips, Pratt deals with "SNL" cast member Kate McKinnon, who manages to make Pratt uncomfortable in one way or another in each short sketch.
McKinnon attempts to get inappropriately close to Pratt by pretending she's not in frame, she pressures him to show off his abs, and even disses Pratt's wife, fellow comedic actress Anna Faris.

You might think that, since Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield are a couple in real life, they would be great at kissing in movie scenes.
You would be wrong.
At least that's what this hilarious sketch from "Saturday Night Live" would have you think. Over the weekend, Garfield appeared on the show and starred in some fantastic sketches. But the one that made the biggest splash online was one in which his "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" co-star and (unconfirmed but pretty obvious) girlfriend made a cameo.

Miley Cyrus's ubiquitous presence in the entertainment news may have helped "Saturday Night Live" to retain the ratings it got for last week's season-premiere episode, but if the show was hoping for a boost from Cyrus's current notoriety, those hopes weren't realized. The ratings for Cyrus's "SNL" episode were strong compared to last year's same-week episode but only equal to those of recent episodes.
The Cyrus-hosted episode of "SNL" was delayed almost a half hour by a football game that ran long, but that didn't deter many viewers, according to early results from markets in which Nielsen employs Local People Meter devices.